I feel a little like a broken record on this site, since every other post makes some reference to how Cormac McCarthy is this great Messiah of misery, but he just fucking rules. No exaggeration. Cities of the Plain is the third book from the Border Trilogy, featuring John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, young cowboys who we met in All The Pretty Horses (Cole) and The Crossing (Parham). They have been through some serious fucking shit already, but seem to have finally got it together working on a ranch for a nice guy (Mac) and doing their cowboy horse whispering shit in the sunshine. Then John Grady falls in love with a dying prostitute and you know instantly that McCarthy is gearing up to flex his bleak muscles.

I was talking about Cormac McCarthy’s writing style to my housemate the other day actually. She loves the free and easy ‘spontaneous prose’ rubbish by Jack Kerouac, and I was explaining why she was very very wrong. McCarthy doesn’t worry about traditional sentence structure or denoting speakers or even punctuation, but his writing is fluid and poetic and feels like molten chocolate rolling around your head, whereas I just want to send Kerouac to night school. There are some proper beautiful bits in Cities of the Plain.

Someone at the far side of the arena touched the brim of his hat and the spotter raised one hand and turned and the auctioneer said now six no six I have six who’ll give me seven seven seven.

Anyways the dogs wont hunt on Sunday either. They’re Christian dogs.

Mr Parham, he said. Every male in my family for three generations has been killed in defense of this republic. Grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers. Eleven men in all. Any beliefs they may have had now reside in me. Any hopes. This is a sobering thought to me. You understand? I pray to these men. Their blood ran in the streets and gutters and in the arroyos and amongst the desert stones. They are my Mexico and I pray to them and I answer to them and to them alone. I do not answer elsewhere. I do not answer to pimps.

If that’s not enough to make you read it, there is an incredible knife fight near the end. Serious can’t-read-fast-enough excitement.

Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain
Publication date: 1998
Publisher: Picador
Price then: not stated
Price now: £2.99
Purchased from: Ebay

From the synopsis: “Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try.”

Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses
Publication date: 1994
Publisher: Picador
Prince then: £5.99
Price now: £2.43
Purchased from: Ebay

From the synopsis: “The ride is exhilarating, the journey fetching, haunting and draining, like any great step worth taking.”

I’d first heard of Cormac McCarthy when the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men a couple of years ago, but the first of his books that I read was The Road. I think they’re currently making a film of that too, with Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, although I can’t imagine how they’ll manage to sell a film featuring a baby roasting on a spit that isn’t some kind of sick gore-porn thing. I don’t believe any film will capture the unrelenting and ever-mounting tension from the book, especially when you consider the fact that nothing much happens. It is purely McCarthy’s incredible prose that makes it what it is.

But I’m here to talk about All The Pretty Horses, not The Road. I’ve been struggling to remember if I’ve ever actually read a western before this, and I certainly can’t think of one, but then this isn’t exactly your standard Clint Eastwood-at-the-saloon kind of affair. It the story of two teenage boys who take off from their ranch homes in Texas and travel into Mexico, getting into trouble and falling in love and staring death in the face in bandit-run jails.

McCarthy has a way of writing that brings vast country to life, including its problems and threats. He links long sentences together with loads of conjunctions and builds sweeping imagery really well. And the way he talks about shocking violence as if it’s just another thing to survive, like a summer lightning storm or a long day’s ride, is almost frightening in its intensity. It takes a lot for my to overlook his lack of apostrophes, but he’s just brilliant enough that it doesn’t matter to me. Or, I should say, it dont matter none.

“His father took out his cigarettes and lit one and put the pack on the table and put his Third Infantry Zippo lighter on top of it and leaned back and smoked and looked at him.”

“There was a show was supposed to come through Uvalde, town of Uvalde, and I’d saved up to go see it but they never showed up because the man that run the show got thowed in jail in Tyler Texas for havin a dirty show. Had this striptease that was part of the deal. I got down there and it said on the poster they was going to be in Ardmore Oklahoma in two weeks and that’s how come me to be in Ardmore Oklahoma.”

“You like chicken and dumplins Mr Cole?
Yessir I do. I been partial to em all my life.
Well you’re fixin to get more partial cause my wife makes the best you ever ate.”

“The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.”